Parts procurement: why vehicles wait on the lift

That not every repair can be determined in advance is beyond dispute. With an unidentified noise, nobody knows before the diagnosis which part is needed. The great majority of jobs in an independent workshop are foreseeable, though: service, brakes, exhaust, clutch, dampers, cambelt. For those jobs the part can be there before the vehicle is.

The routine for it needs no system, just a habit and a list. The habit is to capture three details every time an appointment is made. The list records how long your supplier actually takes for which kind of part — not per the catalogue, but measured.

Two routines for the same job — front brakes, appointment on Thursday:

The difference is not time saved at the supplier but a reordered sequence. And it pays twice over: the lift is free again, and the customer needs no replacement vehicle.

Two special cases remain. First the genuine diagnosis, where nobody knows beforehand what is needed — for that you give out a short diagnostic appointment and only then the repair appointment, the same distinction that booking against plannable hours works with. Second the vehicle that arrives on a truck. Both are normal; neither is an argument for treating the foreseeable jobs the same way.

Wrongly delivered parts almost always have the same cause: the order was placed by model and year rather than by vehicle. Within one model range, brake systems, axles and engine variants differ, and a mid-year facelift makes the year of manufacture useless for good.

What is reliable is the vehicle identification number. It appears on the registration document and identifies this one vehicle together with its specification. Everything else is an approximation.

What you ask for when the appointment is made:

• The VIN — the customer finds it on the registration document, and a photo of it is enough.
• The mileage — it decides the scope of the service and what you offer alongside it.
• The symptom in the customer's own words — "squeals when braking, ever since it turned cold" carries more information than "brakes faulty".

When the vehicle does not match the catalogue

Conversions, retrofits, an engine from a donor vehicle, a grey import: here the VIN only helps so far, and the part number on the removed component is the better source. With vehicles like that, a diagnostic appointment before the repair appointment is worth it even when the work itself is routine.

For every kind of part there is a last sensible moment to order. It comes out of the appointment minus the procurement time minus one day of safety. Only your own circle of suppliers knows the procurement times — the factor with an overnight run, the manufacturer, the specialist for older vehicles.

You fill in the right-hand column yourself, and with measured values: note the order date and the arrival date for four weeks, then take the worst value rather than the average. A mean plans half of all cases too tightly.

A stock module replaces one move here: remembering. It attaches the order to the job and says so when something is still missing at the appointment. Somebody still has to enter the procurement times once, and they only come out right if they were measured.

Returns are the part of procurement that quietly costs money — all the more when the parts are already lying there and the customer does not turn up for the appointment. Three points are worth checking in your supplier agreement before the case arises:

• Return periods. They run from the invoice or delivery date, not from the day you notice the part does not fit.
• Excluded product groups. Electrical and electronic parts, opened containers and specially ordered items are frequently excluded from exchange. Those are also the most expensive ones.
• Core charges. On exchange units — alternators, starters, turbochargers, injectors — you pay a deposit you only get back against the old unit. An old part that ends up in the skip is cash.

The organisational counter-move is a fixed place to put things: one box per job, in which old parts stay until the vehicle is collected. It solves two problems at once — the core charge, and the customer's question whether they can see their old part.

Parts the customer brings

You are not obliged to fit parts a customer supplies, and you may decline the job to that extent. If you accept it, responsibility shifts: you answer for your work, not for the quality of the part. If you can see that a part is unsuitable or questionable where safety is concerned, say so. Either way it belongs on the job sheet before the car goes on the lift — in one sentence the customer signs.

Every part ordered has to find two ways: onto the vehicle and onto the invoice. The second goes missing more often, and always at the same place — the delivery note is in goods-in, the job sheet is at the lift.

The move that prevents it is banal: the part number and the price go onto the job sheet when the goods arrive, not later from memory. If you work on paper, staple the delivery note to the job sheet the moment the part comes in.

What follows decides your margin and whether your books can be checked:

• Parts are invoiced individually with a description and a quantity, never as a lump item.
• The incoming document belongs to the audit trail and has to be kept — the retention rules where you operate cover parts documents exactly as they cover invoices.
• If a part pushes the job past the figure you discussed, the customer's approval belongs before the order, not after it.

At this seam a job and invoicing module replaces the copying out: the part captured at goods-in appears on the invoice later without anyone typing it a second time. The move that remains is assigning it to the right job — no software takes that off you.